Comment by TZubiri

Comment by TZubiri 2 days ago

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"They wanted everything to be written into simple primitive Key-Value stores for their new design."

I feel this is a very political phenomenon that is very poignant in democracy, both Argentina and the US have elected executives that promise to chainsaw most of the government bureocracy for cost and streamlining reasons.

There's a chapter of south park where the kids buy a roller coaster park and make it their own way with their own rules, and slowly they start to face the challenges of running the whole operation, they start by hiring a security guard, and then the security guard needs food so they hire some fast food chain and then the bathrooms and etcetera, by the end of the chapter the park is fully operational and as good as always.

I used to be very libertarian and revolutionary too when I was younger, then I tried to revolutionize a codebase, ended up breaking stuff, and when correcting I ended up with the traditional architecture.

I don't doubt that driving a plow over the traditions of the previous generation is necessary, but in my experience there is always more wisdom in what we throw away than what we innovate, so I guess I'm a conservative

luuio 2 days ago

> there is always more wisdom in what we throw away than what we innovate

i have found this to be true throughout my career. not that things cannot improve, they can always improve. but assuming the original work wasn't grossly incompetent, anything "new" tend to make the same [undocumented] mistakes

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  • TZubiri 2 days ago

    An interesting mathematical caveat is that regardless of whether the majority of the work thrown out is correct, throwing the baby with the bathwater may still be optimal, as it might be the only way to affect change. It's not like decreasing the rate of change would decrease the amount of false positives discarded.

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matkoniecz 2 days ago

Note that Argentine definitely needed some change in course given their situation.

Not checked their situation much, but their current ideas were clearly not sustainable given repeated defaults. And general bad situation of population.

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t43562 2 days ago

On the other hand...... if you look at software as a thing that is mostly about people's heads rather than code.

I mean that in a way I think it's more important to have a team that understands the problem domain fully than to have the code itself. Obviously the business might not think so but as a software process, the costly thing to do IMO is get a group of people to a point of common understanding where they can work productively.

When your developers didn't write the code they're unlikely to understand all the reasons why it is the way it is. How do you get them trained up to that level again? One way is a rewrite. The end result may be no better or even worse but now you have people who know the system, the business and they can look after it efficiently....until they all leave and you start again.

This is my devil's advocate answer to my own feeling that one should never rewrite.

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